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| Issue 6 Home | Editorial | Features | Regular Columns | News & Events | Misc. | ||
By Marieke Napier - February 2002
Marieke Napier reports on the Cultivate-Russia Kick off Meeting, held in Moscow in January.
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In January I traveled to Moscow to participate in the Cultivate-Russia [1] kick off meetings. Getting Cultivate Russia off the ground had taken over 18 months of hard work by Monika Segbert and David Fuegi and I think the enthusiasm of everyone present was evident.
All the meetings and workshops were held in the Darwin Museum in central Moscow. Employees of the Russian Cultural Heritage Network (RCHN) are based at the museum and it was a great venue for the launch. We actually got a tour round the place on the Tuesday and I can honestly say I've never seen so many stuffed animals in such a small place!
The main participants at the meeting were the British Council
team from Moscow, the British Council is the principal contractor
and will be responsible for the administrative/financial
co-ordination function, representatives from the five Russian
partners, the European technical partners and members of the
organising group.
Monday was just a general kick off meeting mainly for the partners and some representatives of regional museums, libraries and archives. Links with Cultivate-CEE and Cultivate-CEE were also discussed. Having Russia participate in an EC funded IST project is a new experience and during the 3 days it became clear that there are going to be lots of financial, cultural and political differences to the usual set up, which will hopefully make Cultivate-Russia a really interesting project.
On Tuesday Walter Koch of CSC-Cultural Service Centre Austria talked about the obligations of a National Node in this type of networking project. He also demonstrated his Document server. In the afternoon Jorunn Hesjedal and Sigrid Tollefsen from RBT in Norway talked about the policy document they have been working on and gave some pointers to useful EC/IST Web sites. There was also a presentation from Kirill Nasedkin of RCHN on the www.museum.ru [2] Web site. Two articles have previously been published in Cultivate Interactive on RCHN but their Web site has been substantially updated recently and is worth revisiting [3]. The RCHN attempts to bring together information professionals and promote culture by the use of new technologies. The Web site gives information on over 3000 Russian museums, provides a database of 6000 museum professionals and hosts an impressive, highly active discussion group. All of us European 'experts' were all very impressed, I know we would be very lucky to have such a resource in the UK. Throughout the day all presentations were translated into Russian or English by an excellent translator who was not only fluent in both languages, but also had a fantastic memory and did a great job on some very long speeches.
On Wednesday I started the morning with a presentation and demonstration of Cultivate Interactive. We (the technical partners from the Cultivate-CEE and Cultivate-EU projects) had been asked over to Russia to explain and demonstrate the work we have carried out so far because Cultivate-Russia is intending to do its own technical work. This means that they will be creating a Russian version of Cultivate Interactive in Cyrillic, it will probably be managed by Olga Puchnina (RCHN). We will be providing more information on the Russian magazine in future issues of Cultivate Interactive. There were lots of questions on all aspects of the Web magazine work and there are definite plans to translate some of our articles into Russian. In the afternoon Martin Belcher and Paul Smith from ILRT, based at the University of Bristol, showed the main Cultivate site.
At the end of the 3 days the Russians gave us all a hearty send off, made us all promise to come back and surprised us with presents of Cognac and wine.
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| Dinning at O'Pirosmani Georgian Restaurant |
Moscow city was beautiful, I got a chance to visit all round red square and managed to see Swan Lake at the Bolshoi Theatre. The food was very good, and I particularly enjoyed the Georgian meal at O'Pirosmani, a Georgian restaurant opposite the Novodievitchi monastery; where we even had our own live musical accompaniment. The weather was a lot warmer that we'd all expected at around 0 degrees and Aeroflot got me there and back safely!
I would just like to thank all the members of Cultivate-Russia for making all of our trips to Moscow so enjoyable. Good luck with the project!
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Marieke
Napier
Information Officer
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
England
BA2 7AY
m.napier@ukoln.ac.uk
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk>
Marieke Napier is editor of Cultivate Interactive Web magazine.
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For citation purposes:
Napier, M. "Cultivate-Russia Kick off Meeting, 14th - 16th January 2002", Cultivate Interactive, issue
6, 11 February 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue6/moscow/>
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